It’s that cabin-fever time of year when, with little to write about, I’m usually searching for something, anything to fill this space. Such a predicament I found myself mired in this week while preoccupied with other pressing, non-work-related issues. Then, out of the blue, like a gift from the heavens, an envelope appeared in my mailbox from longtime friend and colleague Chip Ainsworth, who’s wintering in Florida and bailed me out with a “New Yorker” article he thought I’d enjoy. He was right. Not only did I enjoy it, it brought me back some 35 years to the Leeds Reservoir. There, from the road high above, we kept seeing a large fish nestled up against the edge of a massive flat stone in shallow water along the shore, then finally figured out what it was.

But first the article, titled “The Patch” and written by John McPhee of “The Headmaster” fame. The narrative is about chain pickerel and how his pursuit of them with rod and reel related to the recent passing of his 89-year-old dad, himself a longtime fisherman who taught the author to fish. The piece describes pickerel, their habits and sporting value, and it hit home for me on many levels. Even got me reminiscing about my youthful land-surveying days with Stevie Stange, an old friend from South Deerfield who, at the time, was the party chief of our two-man crew during the summer of 1974. A large parcel of Middlefield property was changing hands that summer, and we were surveying it. As I recall, the property, mostly woodland, exceeded 500 acres, had been in the same family for two centuries and had not been surveyed since George Washington’s days, always a fun project.

To be honest, I never knew the quaint Hampshire County town of Middlefield existed until arriving there to start our little project. We began by finding the corners and establishing the property lines, then went around with a 16-foot rod and a level to pinpoint the details for the mapmaker, a job that kept us busy until the leaves fell. Middlefield had a classic rural center of town straight out of the early 19th century, or maybe one of those little towns in Wyoming’s Red Desert, population 12 or something ridiculous. Downtown consisted of one large, two-piece, two-story building with a porch in front. The place served as a country store, restaurant, Post Office, tavern, liquor store and gas station all in one, a great place to strike up conversation, prit’near any time of day or night.

We’d depart for the job each morning at 7 from my grandfather’s South Deerfield home, where Stange was renting an upstairs apartment. From there, we’d snake our way through Whately, Haydenville, Leeds and Westhampton, have breakfast at a Huntington greasy-spoon and arrive at the Middlefield work site about 9. Each day we’d pass the Leeds Reservoir twice, often stopping on the ride home at a little side-of-the-road pullover overlooking the water to search for fish or fowl or whatever happened to be there. With the water at is lowest midsummer level, we kept noticing that aforementioned large fish snuggled up to the major flat stone and wondered what it was and if we could catch it. If it was a trout, it was a beauty, all of two feet long.

Well, our curiosity finally got the better of us and, one evening, we decided to give it a whirl, see exactly what it was, fishing rod in the cargo space of Stange’s Toyota Landcruiser, dubbed the “Toyotski.” We didn’t have any bait but did have a tackle boxful of lures, mostly for warm-water fish like bass or Northern pike. We figured we’d give it a shot with a floating, broken-back Rapala, maybe four inches long. Even if it was a trout, at that size it would likely hit a Rapala. The trick was to get the lure within striking range on the first cast from a challenging distance above, no easy feat for a rookie.

I don’t remember who actually made the cast, but it was a good one, touching down less than two feet in front of the fish with a loud, showy splash. We let it sit there for a minute or less to settle things down a bit before giving it a twitch with the rod tip, then another. The fish didn’t budge, just laid there as motionless as the stone next to it. Then, on the third little twitch, the fish wheeled 90 degrees in a flash and — whammo! — struck like lightning, furious energy, getting a toothy mouthful of piercing treble hooks before taking off, Mitchell 300 drag whistling a shrill mountain tune. We ran down the elevated bank to the reservoir’s edge and played the fish to shore. Then one of us (again, I can’t recall which) ran back up the hill to the “Yotski” for needle-nosed pliers needed to remove the hooks. With the hooks removed, we released the fish back into the water. It was a pickerel, a beauty, two feet or more in length, razor-sharp, pointy teeth, nothing to handle with bare hands.

The released fish was sluggish at first but soon swam right back to its stone-side feeding lair and remained there for many days thereafter. Like McPhee said in his story, pickerel will stay in the same spot for days, weeks, years, unless removed. Well, I can attest to that because of that Leeds Reservoir pickerel that captured our fancy that summer. I witnessed it with my own two eyes, occasionally impaired. Those were the good old days.